Pain in the Ass

What an eventful Sunday. Well, Saturday evening and Sunday.
Late Saturday afternoon, I began getting a sharp pain. In my left butt cheek. Now I am suspected of having TB (I am being tested, don’t panic. You probably won’t have infected it from me if you know me, if you have, I’m so sorry) so I thought that the coughing 90% of the day must be responsible for the dull ache in my derrière. Having snoozed for the afternoon, I woke up at seven and decided that instead of spending an evening being a slave to my laptop, slouching around, miserable, alone at home, I would go to a good friend’s house to go and slouch around, be miserable and a slave on his laptop. Plus he has DSTV which means Crime investigation network marathons (for those that know me I have a healthy fascination with serial killers).

So my friend swung by and picked me up and I spent a good hour insulting people on Facebook from his laptop before I went to lie down and watch the last ten minutes of a horror and some C&IN thereafter.

My butt had not really been aching much since I had woken up from my snooze so I plonked on the bed next to my pal (he has a super duper nice LCD TV which stretches about the length of his bedroom). After pulling his massive hound, Digga, off the bed I was able to settle and start giving advice to a terrified couple being stalked in a motel room on the screen. My friend has no TV in his lounge – it is in the bedroom. So when a bunch of us go round to his place for breakfast to watch the grand prix, we all have our designated “spots” on the bed.

Now this friend of mine is about mid fourties, Jewish and one of the most vulgar characters you would ever have the mixed fortune to meet. But he is like a father to me and has been ever since I got clean. Actually he pretty much saved my life when I was about to pack in four and a half months of torture in rehab to go and use again after I had been ‘asked’ to leave for (ahem) fraternizing with another patient (oh come on, who the hell doesn’t do that in rehab?!!!). Running down the road to go and score, I happened to see his car, knew that he was recovering, beat down his door squawking for help and to cut a long story short, I never made it to the dealer and haven’t since.

Anyway, back to my butt cheek. As I was watching a random doccie on C&IN on another jealous, homicidal boyfriend who offed his sensible girlfriend who had dumped him for being, erm, a freak, I tried to move my legs. My right one obeyed straight away. My left one however, did not.

As one of the worst pains I had ever experienced seared through my butt cheek and down my leg, I squealed and writhed in pain which, in turn, caused me to squeal even more and writhe further and so on. This went on for about ten minutes by the end of which my friend wanted to take me to hospital and his poor dog was severely traumatized from the strange lady clutching a buttock, tossing on the bed and disturbing his sleep. I don’t want to think about what the neighbours thought was going on.

I found that if I lay completely flat on the bed, the pain was bearable. But after the psycho boyfriend in the documentary had been put behind bars and the family had cried in their interview, I was bored and wanted to load some photos on Facebook. Once I was up and about on my feet, the searing pain had retreated into a barely noticeable ache. At half past one, I woke my friend up to drive me home. Well, I actually threatened to steal his car if he didn’t wake up, so he was out of bed rather quickly. I actually ended up driving his car home with him as a passenger, after which he was fully awake and unable to sleep for the rest of the evening. I then went to bed, thinking nothing more of the pain.

Until the next morning.

I woke up. And wished I had never been born.
The pain was so bad, I started crying. I tried to get up, but the slightest movements made me wince and howl in pain like a goth at a Take That concert.

After lying on the bed for a while, figuring out what to do, I realized I needed to pee. Oh Christ. My bathroom is a nine pace walk from my bed, so you can imagine the trauma. I managed to get to the bathroom in what can only be described as looking like some form of interpretive dance: even standing up on my feet required me to grab my desk chair for support. And my butt.

Afterwards, collapsing back onto my bed, I called my sister Alex, who is a physiotherapist. We are originally from Durban and usually speak like La Lucia Kugels when on the phone, hence some individuals think I am mentally challenged.

After calming me down, she worked out that I have a ‘trigger point’ in my left butt cheek which is pinching a nerve. She told me to get some anti-inflammatory gel or pills and it should help. So, because I have no car and a throbbing butt cheek, I did not opt for the walk-to-chemist-for-advised-anti-inflammatories option. An hour later I was about to get taken to the emergency room for the pain.

Luckily for me, I managed to grab onto a teensy weensy bit of dignity inside me and realized that if a doctor was going to be fondling my nether regions, I was going to have a shower before setting of to the hospital. And miraculously, the pain stopped in the shower, probably because of the hot water and walking around.

Taking that as some pretty important insight into my condition, I steered clear of lying on my bed, instead choosing to ‘perch’ and cancelled my lift to Christian Barnaard Memorial Hospital.

Yet even now as I write this, and I am lying down and my bum is killing me on my left hand side. Now, my sister says that if the pain does not go away, the only remedy is to get a physio to stick a needle in my bum cheek. Joy.

She did mention, however, that this is “really common” and that she “sticks needles in peoples bum cheeks all the time”.